“Corruption will be with us always”, says PM
Prime Minister Dean Barrow
On Thursday, the Prime Minister’s Business Forum was held under the theme, “Embracing Innovation for Economic Prosperity”. One of the guest speakers at the event was Linner Viik. He is the founder of the Estonian eGovernment Academy, a consultancy organization aimed at empowering central and local governments in decision making through digital transformation programmes. E-governance minimizes the need for human resources and, in a way, can weed out corruption. Prime Minister Dean Barrow says that corruption will always be present because no foreign system can halt the ingenuity, creativity, and enterprise of Belizeans to outdo the system.
Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“Lock chain in the document system, absolutely. I am all for it. In other words, while corruption will be with us always, men there are certain things that we must work especially hard to try to take out of that corruption circle. Things like nationality and those sort of things must be one, absolutely.”
Reporter
“A system like that where those who see the government as an enterprise, elected officials or those close to them, would be trapped by this system and not able and then it would ease the pressure on the boss because you wouldn’t have to say for God’s sake please stop it. The system would stop them.”
Dean Barrow
“But you and I know and remember I am repeating I do want to see an acceleration of digitization. I would want to see in particular areas since we can’t do everything all at once, that we have at it pretty quickly. But you and I know, and I won’t put it in the context of human nature, I would put it in the context of good old Belizean ingenuity, creativity, enterprise, you can’t bring no system here where people will not find a way to get over that will absolutely stop people that nobody will can come up. That system, I don’t care how well they have done in Estonia, but you can’t bring that here and tell me that nobody will get over. I am saying, I therefore have no unrealistic expectation but I do think a great deal can be done to help with process delivery and to help with the minimization with some of the excesses that I think we all have to agree must be fought, must be attacked, must be combated.”
